June 5 - Jacques Demy

Happy Birthday, Jacques Demy! Born today in 1931, this French lyricist, screenwriter and film director appeared in the wake of the French New Wave. 

This was alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Today, Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style. 

  

Among his credits, Demy is best known for writing and directing the 1961 French/Italian black and white romance/musical drama film 'Lola'. 

  

In Nantes, a bored young man named Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) is letting life pass him by when he has a chance meeting with a woman he knew when he was a teenager.  

  

Lola (Anouk Aimée), now a cabaret dancer, is also the devoted single mother of a young son, and she harbors the hope that his father, who deserted her during pregnancy, will return.  

  

Roland falls in love with Lola, and this gives sudden purpose to his life. But how does Lola feel about Roland? 

  

Demy is also best known for the two musicals he wrote and directed in the mid-1960s. 

This included the 1964 French/West German Technicolor musical/romance drama film 'Les parapluies de Cherbourg' ('The Umbrellas of Cherbourg'). 

This also included the 1967 French Eastmancolor musical/romance film 'Les demoiselles de Rochefort' ('The Young Girls of Rochefort'). 

  

The former film follows Geneviève Emery (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful young Frenchwoman who works at a small-town boutique selling umbrellas. She later falls for dashing mechanic Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo).  

  

However, their brief romance is interrupted when Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War. 

Though pregnant by Guy, Geneviève marries an older businessman, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), and begins to move on with her life.  

  

Throughout the musical film, all the characters' dialogue is conveyed through song. The music was composed by French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and jazz pianist Michel Legrand. 

The film's dialogue is all sung as recitative, including casual conversation, and is sung-through, or through-composed like some operas and stage musicals. 

  

The latter film follows Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange Gamier (Françoise Dorléac). Both are twin sisters who each want to find romance and leave their small seaside town of Rochefort.  

  

They soon befriend a couple of visiting carnival workers who frequent their lonely mother Yvonne's (Danielle Darrieux) café and hire the girls to sing in the carnival.  

  

Also wanting a career as a songwriter, Solange falls for an American musician, Andy Miller (Gene Kelly), while Delphine dumps her beau and searches Rochefort for her ideal man. 

  

Demy's style drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the documentary realism of his New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. 

  

His films contain overlapping continuity (i.e., characters cross over from film to film), lush musical scores (typically written by Legrand). 

This also included containing motifs like teenage love, labor rights, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. 

  

According to Demy's persona; life, had had been married to Belgian-born French film director, photographer, and artist Agnès Varda ('Cléo from 5 to 7', 'Vagabond', 'The Gleaners & I') from 1962–1990. They had two children together. 

  

Demy passed on October 27, 1990 in Paris, France. He was 59. Originally, it was reported that he had died from cancer. 

However, in 2008, Varda revealed that Demy had passed from HIV/AIDS. Demy was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. 

  

On June 5, 2019, a Google Doodle was created in what would have been Demy's 88th birthday.

 

Nicknamed Jaquot, Demy had been active from 1955–1988. 

  

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